


Not Quite Like Heaven

by Katiebug445



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: AU, Fictober 2018, M/M, armin's a ghost
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-06
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-17 22:41:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29233182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katiebug445/pseuds/Katiebug445
Summary: Jean moves into a new apartment and finds a little bit more than he bargained for.
Relationships: Armin Arlert/Jean Kirstein
Kudos: 14





	Not Quite Like Heaven

$300 a month. In the bad part of town. In a building older than his parents. There had to be some kind of a catch, right? Jean parked his car on the street just outside the rickety old building, thinking to himself that one good wind could have knocked the whole thing over like a Jenga tower, and let out a low whistle. It wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination perfect, but it was a roof, four walls, and it was cheap enough that he could afford it, and that, for a college student on minimum wage, was as close to perfect as he was gonna get right now.

He pulled the key out of the ignition and took one more look at the place before reaching across the passenger seat and grabbing one of his duffle bags. Then he opened the door and stepped out into the late summer heat, a bead or two of sweat rolling down the back of his neck. Jean quickly wiped it away, hitched his bag up higher on his shoulder, and stepped inside.

His apartment was on the very top floor, which meant in the event of the building going down like a Jenga tower, he would most likely be squished in the fall, but he couldn’t say he would be too upset about that. At least he wouldn’t have his student loans to worry about anymore.

He crossed the threshold into his room and noted that it was at least five degrees cooler in here than in the entire rest of the building. He couldn’t help but wonder if his AC was on the fritz, or if there was a draft, or a combination of both things. Or, he supposed, it could be haunted. That’d be a perfect catch. He snorted, setting his back down in what would become his room.

Five more trips later and he had his car completely unloaded, and had piles of junk scattered all around his new home. Jean’s eyes scanned over all of his belongings, trying to picture what everything would look like when it was all together, but he was having trouble seeing passed the boxes and garbage bags full of his clothes.

His mother would be bringing over the bigger stuff tomorrow morning with Marco, and he was already grateful for the help. He doubted if he could haul his matress up five flights of stairs by himself without dying in the process. Thankfully, his best friend had loaned him an air mattress for the night, and Jean unloaded it from one of the boxes, plugged it in, and began blowing it up right there in the corner of the small living room.

While it inflated, he started hunting around for his blankets and the pillow he’d brought with him, muttering to himself the entire time for not taking the extra minute and actually labeling things before shoving it all inside the boxes.

Finally, he found a thin, ratty looking sheet, and decided that would have to be enough for right now, and he figured that his arm would work as good as any pillow. With a yawn, he got up, locked the door, got ready for bed, and settled in. He pulled up one of his playlists on his phone, set it beside his head, and closed his eyes, letting the music wash over him and help him drift off to sleep.

“Hello?”

“Can you hear me?”

“Hello?”

Jean snapped up at 2 AM, eyes darting around and looking into every inch of the shadows that he could see. He knew he heard something just then, and it was not part of the songs. He knew that for damn sure. He laid there for another moment, still trying to see if he could see anything, and when the idea of trying to sleep finally completely escaped him, he pulled the sheet back off of himself, and got up to flip on one of the lights. With the shadows gone, he did a sweep all the way through his house, not finding anything out of the ordinary, and shakily went back to his bed.

Half of the air had gone out of his mattress, and with a groan and knowing that he’d be on the floor in the morning if he let it go, Jean plugged the cord back in and started filling it all the way back up again. Goosebumps rose on his arms while he waited, and his skin was cold to the touch, so, while his bed filled back up, he started hunting through more of the boxes in search of his thicker blankets.

He thought he could hear cardboard scraping off to his left, but when he looked over, everything was still in place. He went back to rummaging, and heard it again. God, he hoped he hadn’t accidentally packed up his cat when he was in a hurry…

Jean ripped the tape off of the box, and, much to his relief, there wasn’t the little orange cat inside, but there was the blankets he’d been looking for. Saying a quick thank you to whoever could be listening, he pulled them out and dragged them back to his bed, pressing the heel of his hand down onto it and making sure it was firm enough for him to sleep on, before unplugging it from the wall again and settling in.

The thought entered his head again that he definitely heard something in his house, but he tried to will himself not to think about it for fear of freaking himself out to the point that he couldn’t sleep. He convinced himself, for the time being, that it was an ad on his phone, and that was all. Feeling a little better, he closed his eyes, and after about twenty minutes of uneasily laying there, he finally drifted back off to sleep.

When he woke up the next morning, all of the boxes, that he knew he closed back up, were wide open. His trashbags full of clothes were ripped, and several of his shirts were spilling out onto the floor. Puzzled, Jean picked all of his scattered things up and shoved them off to the side, knowing they’d only be in the way when his mom and Marco showed up later. He tried to convince himself that it was mice that did it. Mice, or very, very determined moths that wanted his sweaters.

It couldn’t have been anything else, could it?

The voice and the scratching from the night before crossed his mind again, and he could feel the hairs on his arms standing straight up at the thought that there was something other in his new home, but he shook his head, trying to clear those thoughts away before they took hold and freaked him out completely. He needed this apartment. He couldn’t freak himself out of living here already.

Moving had actually gone okay, considering it was just the three of them. Marco had taken a bad fall down the stairs towards the end, and both Kirsteins insisted that he take it easy and watch them move the rest and keep an ice pack on his head to manage the swelling. He protested, but when Jean threatened to kick him out completely, Marco finally ended up sitting on one of the chairs they’d just brought up, and settled in.

They had a quick dinner, and then the two left, leaving Jean there in his apartment alone again. He gathered up his sheets and his blankets from the floor and took them into his new room to put on his mattress. When everything was on his bed, he brought in a couple of the bags of clothes and started to put things away in his dresser and closet. Then he brought in his desk lamp, and a couple other small things and got everything set up how he wanted it for the time being, and then got started on the rest of the house. It was late, and he knew he needed to be getting to bed soon, but he was excited to get things set up, and he wanted to keep working until his body finally demanded rest.

Given the hour, he decided to wait and move the heavy furniture around in the morning, but he got his bookshelf set up, his movies put away, and even managed to put together the stand that would hold his vast music collection. Tomorrow, he’d dig out his radio and set it up on one of the stands near his window, so he could listen to music while he worked. That done, he pulled out his phone and went into his room, stripping down to his boxers, and climbed into bed.

Nothing happened that night that he could tell. Everything was still in the places he remembered shoving them the night before, and he hadn’t heard the voice again. Maybe it really was something like mice and a radio ad. Maybe he wasn’t dealing with something weird after all.

Maybe he’d just gotten lucky with this place.

Jean set his phone down on his kitchen counter for just a minute while he went to look for his small collection of plates, and when his back was turned, he heard a small thud. His heart sank when he didn’t hear his music coming from his phone anymore, and when he got back out into the kitchen, he was relieved to see that the back had just popped off the phone, and the battery had fallen out. Aside from that, the phone was in perfect condition. He popped it all back in, turned it back on, and everything went back to normal. He put his kitchen things away and sang gently under his breath as he did so. Though, in the back of his mind, he had to wonder exactly how his phone had fallen off. If he remembered right, he’d stuck it near the back up against the wall to avoid that very thing from happening.

His eyes went to his phone, but he shook it off after a moment. Maybe he’d just imagined sticking it back that far.

The next day, Jean left to pick up a few groceries, and upon returning, found that his stand he had his CDs in was knocked face down onto the floor, and several of the cases had been cracked. With an annoyed sigh, he picked it back up, and made a mental note to get some tape the next day so he could fix what was broken. When putting the stand back upright, a chill ran down his spine that he couldn’t explain, and didn’t go away for the rest of the afternoon.

Over the coming weeks, Jean kept track of all the weird things that happened in his apartment. He came home from classes one afternoon to find his bed completely unmade, the blankets and sheets bunched up into a ball in the middle of the mattress; a book had been removed from his shelf, and he found it two days later under his couch; food had gone missing a handful of times; lights would turn on and off on their own; more often than not, Jean would randomly walk into a cold spot in his apartment, that almost seemed to follow him for hours afterwards; and probably the most troubling of all, he was still hearing a voice.

The first couple times it happened, he’d been able to convince himself that it was an ad, or one of his neighbors above or below him, but the third time it happened, he was laying in his bed, trying to sleep, when he heard a soft call of his name, directly in his ear, which was followed by another draft that chilled him right to the bone.

Jean sat straight up in bed, completely freaked out, and ended up having to call Marco and talk to him for over an hour just to calm himself back down enough that he could attempt to sleep again.

By the end of his first month there, he had completely convinced himself that he was living in a haunted house. Once he got his wifi hooked up, he began looking up things about hauntings, and what to do if you thought your house was, in fact, haunted, and everything he was experiencing matched up almost perfectly. A couple times, he attempted to set traps for his suspected houseguest, but nothing ever came of it. Everything always remained exactly how he left it before.

Jean was exhausted, frustrated, and almost ready to start apartment hunting again. He hadn’t been sleeping well between the stress of his new job, college, and whatever the hell was happening in his house, and he knew that would only be a matter of time before his health started suffering as a result. That, and, no matter how many layers of clothes he wore, how many blankets he slept with, or how much he could stand to crank the heat up to, he was always, always cold. From the time he opened the door at night, to the time he left in the morning, a chill clung to him and wouldn’t let go for anything. He tried to tell Marco about what was going on, but the other man had just wrote it off as a draft, and told him that he should complain about it if it kept happening.

It happened near the end of October. Jean had woken up nearly two hours early on account of being so fucking cold in his room, and decided to try his hand at making oatmeal in hopes of it warming him up some. He was standing by the microwave, arms folded across his chest and hands running up and down them in hopes of getting a little blood flowing, when he saw it.

A face was peering in at him through the open wall that looked directly into the living room. Jean stopped dead, all of his remaining blood seeming to drain out of his body. There was someone in his house. Someone was staring directly at him. Jean swallowed, unable to look away from the intruder, and nearly jumped out of his skin when the microwave beeped suddenly. “What the hell do you want?” he asked, trying to keep the quiver from showing too much in his voice.

“Wait, you can see me?” the figure asked, excitement in its own voice. “You can actually see me?”

“Yes?”

A smile lit up the face, and Jean’s eyes followed it as it walked around through the doorway, and stood in front of him. It was a boy, no taller than 5’4”, with a mop of blond hair and blue eyes so big and bright that they would have put the afternoon sky to shame. “Can you still see me?”

“See you, hear you, I can do it all, buddy. Now who are you, and why are you in my house?”

“I’m… Armin. And this is my house. I can’t… I can’t believe you can actually see me! You’re the first.”

“No, this is my house. My name’s on the lease and everything. And what - what the hell are you talking about, I’m the first what?”

The smile dropped away from the boy’s face, and he let out a heavy breath. “This used to be my house. A long time ago. I, uh, died? About twenty years ago. And you’re the first person in twenty years who’s been able to see me. You have no idea how lonely it gets. Thank you.”

Jean blinked, his brain taking a minute to catch up with everything, and he felt the hair on the back of his neck begin to stand up. A ghost. There was an honest to god ghost standing right in front of him. His house was haunted, and he had a ghost in front of him. Oh, god, he knew there was a catch. There was always a catch. “Well… nice to meet you, I think?” He said, his voice smaller than intended.

“It’s nice to meet you too, Jean, is it?”

“Yeah.” He squeaked.

“Well,” the ghost named Armin started, holding out his hand, “I’m sure this isn’t how you intended to get a roommate, but…”

Jean stared at the offered hand for a moment before finally reaching out, and, much to his surprise, finding a solid - but very, very cold - hand gripping him back. With a shock, he pulled his own back, and stared between his and Armin’s, not knowing what to make of any of this. “I… this is gonna take some getting used to.”

“Ditto.” Armin agreed, giving him a bit of an awkward smile.

Jean thought about it for a moment while he finally pulled his breakfast out of the microwave and began to eat. “I guess… having a ghost of a roommate might not be a bad thing. You gotta help with rent, though.” he attempted to joke.

Thankfully, Armin took it the right way, and shot him another smile. “How about I just keep you company and promise not to make you think you’re going crazy anymore?”

Jean pretended to mull it over, pursing his lips for a second, and smiled. “I think I can live with that.“


End file.
